1.2: Who are Infants and Toddlers?

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Todd LaMarr

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Infants and Toddlers

As a collective, the term “infants and toddlers” refers to children from birth to three years of age. More specifically, infancy refers to children between birth and one year of age, while toddlerhood refers to children between 1 and three years of age. In many texts, infants and toddlers are perceived as a homogenous group (i.e., Maguire-Fong, 2014); however, recent research highlights the importance of recognizing the individual differences between children under three years of age (Frank, Braginsky, Yurovsky & Marchman, 2021; Kidd, Donnelly & Christiansen, 2018; Pérez‐Edgar, Vallorani, Buss & LoBue, 2020). It is now undeniable一one cannot consider all infants or toddlers to be developmentally similar or to have similar experiences. There are important, early forming and long-lasting individual developmental differences (Marchman & Fernald, 2008).

Infants and toddlers in the U.S. represent a diverse group demographically. The organization Zero to Three conducts a large annual report revealing state and national data on infants and toddlers (Keating et al., 2021). Across the years, the data have revealed a few general findings that are noteworthy when considering who infants and toddlers are and their individual differences (each year’s data may be different so this list presents average findings across the years that data has been collected so far):

Over 50% of the nation’s children under three years of age are children of color.
About 40% of infants and toddlers live in households where the income is less than twice the federal poverty level (about $50,000 a year for a family of four in 2018).
Approximately 20% of infants and toddlers live with a single parent.
Infants and toddlers have the highest rates of abuse and neglect of any age group.
Approximately 20% infants and toddlers have already been exposed to one adverse childhood experience and about 7% have experienced two or more.
Less than 40% of infants and toddlers are read to every day.
There are racial/ethnic disparities across several critical domains, such as prenatal care, preterm birth rates, breastfeeding rates and crowded housing.
There are disparities based on family income, such as maternal mental health, breastfeeding rates, neighborhood safety, adverse childhood experiences, book reading frequency, and developmental screenings.
States differ greatly in offering positive learning experiences in child care settings and in the homes of families.